Jo Shapcott asks
whether there is
such a thing as
'female' poetry
any of the
poems in my
next book are
influenced by
the artist
Helen Chadwick, whose
early work
made much use of images of her own
body - until a change in the late 1980s.
She wrote: "I made a conscious decision in 1988 not to represent my body
. . . It immediately declares female gender and I wanted to be more deft." I
think I am in love with the word "deft",
which seems to me to describe exactly
how a poet should be - but apart from
that I was intrigued by the idea of art
that might not declare gender. When I
applied the idea to poetry I saw how
prescriptive we can be - particularly as
readers - in our assumptions about the
influence of gender on writing.
A related question has been knocking around in my head for the past few
weeks: do women genuinely write
different poems from men and, if so,
what could be said to characterise
the "female" poem? The occasion that prompted the ques
tion happened when the
Aldeburgh poetry festival and the Poetry Society combined to
host an event called
The Female Poem,
which I chaired, and
which boasted a distinguished panel of writers:
Maureen Duffy, Annie
Freud and Pascale Petit.
It was so popular thatit
sold out in minutes
and had to be moved
to a larger hall, which
suggests the subject
is urgent - and not
just to women; our
audience was mixed.
The other mem-
bers of the panel had been equally
haunted by the question. We realised
that for our own day-to-day writing it
was perhaps more important not to let
thoughts about gender dominate, certainly not at first, so that the language
can lead us into places, characters and
identities we can't always anticipate. It
was pretty clear that such thoughts are
not expected of men, though: their poetry is set as a kind of default mode,
echoing Simone de Beauvoir's idea that
"man is defined as a human being and
a woman as female". So while women
readers are happy to devour anything
that is good, male readers are sometimes nervous of poetry books by
women - those with editorial experience among us had noticed it was
difficult to get men to review women's
books, as if a different, specialised
expertise was necessary. Or, that the
kudos was less?
But there are advantages: the panel
was convinced that a poet ought to be
an outsider. The edge, the discomfort,
makes for clearer vision. Duffy reminded us of the audacity and courage
of Aphra Behn in this regard. Virginia
Woolf pinpointed the feeling of an outsider beautifully in A Room of One's
Own: "I thought how unpleasant it is to
be locked out; and I thought how it is
worse, perhaps, to be locked in."
And we all relished the freedom of
shifting boundaries; the extreme polarity of male/female doesn't necessarily
fit who we are and how we write. The
poet can be moved along a continuum
of femininity and masculinity in poems to produce
the effects or characters
needed. We immediately
thought of poets who do
this, such as Keats, or Dickinson. As
you might guess, there was no final
agreement as to whether there is a distinctly female poetic sensibility: some
thought that you could pinpoint a
unique openness to the world and the
body in women's writing, others
thought these were exciting options for
any writer, just as territories that might
be seen as particularly masculine are
open to everyone.
CJUnderwood: As far as I'm concerned,
gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality and so
on have no impact on the nature of a
poem. All that matters is that the work
has something valid and interesting to
say, not who or what is saying it.
degrus: But everyone has an age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality (or two) and so
on, and we experience them all the
time. We are never not experiencing
our age, gender, etc. Are you saying
that poetry comes from - or ought to
come from - somewhere that has nothing to do with our actual, everyday,
breathing experiences? That the origins
of echt poetry lie, somehow, in some
way, outside us? That to allow our age,
gender, etc, to show in our poetry is to
contaminate something that ought not
have anything to do with such ordinary
- even vulgar - things? That poetry
shouldn't describe what it is like for us,
saddled or armed with our particular
gender and so on, to go about the business of living?
BillyMills: There are women poets
whose voice is inescapably female: HD
and Plath, say. Then there are others
who address gender-related topics in a
verse that is, in most respects, indistinguishable from their male counterparts
(Mary Barber and her contemporaries
among them). But could you really tell
the gender of Marianne Moore (pictured) by reading "The Steeple-Jack",
or even "Marriage"? The problem with
this discussion is that there is no single
answer; poets are individuals, and, despite the constraints of both social and
literary convention, the best ones
manage to find voices that go way
beyond any narrow definition of
who they are. If they are good
enough, their works may survive long past a time when any
idea of their personal identity
has evaporated.
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